English composer Michael Berkeley, whose work is in the Sydney and Perth festivals, talks to Julie Copeland about his career, which began as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral in the 60s. The godson of Benjamin Britten, Berkeley is committed to the performance of contemporary music and in particular, the hardest of all, new opera.

One of Australia's leading writers, David Malouf, explores translation and tragedy in his new version of Euripides' ancient Greek myth, Hippolytus.

In the program's regular Maker segment, Malouf describes the process of adapting Euripides' worldly and sardonic language for audiences at the Sydney Festival.

And director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Tom Sokolowski, who is the guest in Hot Spot the program's weekly comment piece, reflects on the state of the visual arts and the gallery scene in New York, post September 11.

Details or Transcript:

Julie Copeland : The energetic rhythms of Or Shall We Die? An oratorio with words by the novelist Ian McEwan, composed by my guest for the second hour of this Sunday Morning, Michael Berkeley

Apart from composing, Michael Berkeley wears several other hats. He’s a well-known broadcaster on BBC Radio and Television, he directs the prestigious Cheltenham International Music Festival in Britain, and he’s just been in Sydney, directing an interesting chamber music program at Angel Place—which we’ll talk about in a moment.

But as with most contemporary composers, Berkeley’s own music was strongly influenced by Modernism. Here are a few thoughts from the remarkably erudite Peter Conrad, who I spoke to at the time his very large survey of 20th Century Art, Modern Times, Modern Places was released. In his book, Peter Conrad traces the way European Modernism began in the last century. With symbols of resurrection alongside, as now, apocalyptic doomsday fears for the future.So where did that leave modern music? After all, before that, classical and romantic music had been divine, ethereal, coming from the ether. But if, as Nietzsche proclaimed, God was dead, wasn’t that a huge dilemma for composers?

Peter Conrad: Yes. A great problem for them. And something that we’ve not really recovered from is that if God is no longer the sponsor of music—I mean in the mythology of music, it’s the god Apollo who endows his favourite, Orpheus, with the power of song, and gives him this power of song to atone for the tribulations of existence and to console him for the loss of his spouse Euridice—If you could no longer believe in the divine pedigree of music, then didn’t you have to abandon the very notion of music? Because music is this harmonic organisation of sound which is a replica for some sort of divine order in the universe. Hence the myth of the Harmony of the Spheres, the chiming spheres which each made a separate sound and the sounds added up into the octave. Well if you got rid of this cosmological guarantee for music—

Julie Copeland: And fragmented the whole structure

Peter Conrad: Sure. Was there any such thing as music any more? Wasn’t it just maybe noise? And this is a question that really we are still asking ourselves.

Julie Copeland : But you do quote Bartok’s Music of the Spheres. But he was writing more about ‘out there in the universe’, wasn’t he? I mean his music was coming from somewhere out there in space. It wasn’t divine

Peter Conrad: Or it was coming out of the bodies of living creatures. Often out of the bodies of insects. The Bartok pieces that I love are his enormous encyclopaedia of piano pieces, Microcosmos, little, absolutely microcosmic, things which are sometimes only 15 or 20 seconds long, which describe the buzzing of a fly—is actually making music out of its body—or the noises that insects make at night, which he transcribes so beautifully in his long, unaccompanied violin sonata, as well as in bits and pieces of the Night Music in the Concerto for Orchestra. He in a way recovered from the fact that there was no longer any divine sponsor for music by saying, ‘Well we don’t need God to teach us how to be musicians, we can learn how to be musicians from listening to the insects.

Julie Copeland : And Janacek listened to the birds.

Peter Conrad: Janacek even more beautifully notating the musical speech—not only of swallows and nightingales and singing birds—but also of his chooks in the backyard, you know, and pointing out that they, too, were singing. And he pointed out that one little bird, a thrush or something like that—even though it had a bird brain, I mean a tiny little brain less than the size of a pea—could produce something like 30 or 40 notes in five seconds, which made human beings sound very inarticulate to Janacek. But apart from Janacek and Bartok there’s not, elsewhere, much hope in this early period. The Viennese a-tonalists took a positive pride in assaulting the ears and the sensibilities of their first auditors. Schoenberg conducted those songs of Berg’s—the Altenberg Lieder—at a concert in Vienna I think in 1912, and half the audience turned up in the consulting offices of Freud and his colleagues a week later, saying that they’d been driven to nervous breakdowns by these sounds which they’d been made to listen to.

Julie Copeland : And this was a product of the kind of modernist concepts of space and scale and time—and randomness, too, I suppose. Because Einstein had already refigured space and time. And that of course affected the way composers worked. Especially in a-tonal music.

Peter Conrad: Yes. Exactly. These songs of Berg’s, the Altenberg Lieder, which are set to just sort of jottings on postcards, written by a friend of his, Peter Altenberg, really are slightly frightening things still, even though it’s 85 years since they were first heard. In the third of them, there’s a mournful passacaglia which appears to be elegiacally glancing around the universe and seeing that there is nothing there and the singer begins to describe the scene that she’s looking at. And then she stops singing—and whispers something, as if this is a truth which you’ve got to utter under your breath. And what she says is, ‘Plötzlich ist Alles aus.’ Suddenly it’s all over. You could see why that would be a shocking thing to be told. We now live with that knowledge.

Julie Copeland : And how do you go on from there?

Peter Conrad: How do you? You don’t. You don’t. You fall silent.

Julie Copeland : The Altenberg Lieder by Alban Berg, proving they didn’t fall silent, after all. And that was Tasmanian-born Peter Conrad, who’s now an Oxford Don and the author of a very large, very readable account of twentieth century Modernism. And so to the English composer and music festival director, Michael Berkeley, who has impeccable music credentials. The eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, as a boy soprano he worked frequently with his godfather, the composer Benjamin Britten. And in his late twenties Michael went on to study with Richard Rodney Bennett. But his glorious career began as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral.

Michael Berkeley: Yes, my father used to hear me singing myself to sleep when I was about 8 years old—no, younger, actually—six years old. And he thought well, actually it’s not a bad voice. And at that time a very famous harpsichordist called George Malcolm was the Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral and so I went there from the age of eight. And actually it was a wonderful start in musical life. I often say to people it’s a bit like Austrian and Swiss children almost learn to ski before they walk. I began to read Gregorian Plainchant almost before I could read words. And I loved it. And we did lots of polyphony by Victoria and Palestrina. And my father wrote for the choir and Benjamin Britten wrote for the choir, too, while I was there. So it was a fabulous time.

Julie Copeland : An absolutely blue-ribbon beginning, I’d say. But why composition, rather than a performer?

Michael Berkeley: Well actually, I’d known I wanted to compose since I was six. But I only kind of got it together—you know I think people develop at different stages and we assume that everybody is going to be prodigiously gifted when they’re young if they’re going to be a musician, but it isn’t always like that. I always take comfort from the fact that Verdi wrote his greatest opera, Otello, when he was in his eighties. Although I did actually compose, and composition was my principal subject at the Royal Academy of Music. And then when I was about 20, I’d played in a rock group and things like that, I got renal tuberculosis. And that’s quite a good reminder of mortality. Because you know when you’re 18 or 20 you think you’ll live for ever. And I suddenly realised that look, if I really wanted to get down to this, I needed to do some serious work. And I always knew that actually music was the way in which I could express myself. So I went and started again, composition really, with Richard Rodney Bennett—you know, who’s written lots of wonderful film music, like Murder on the Orient Express, and things like that, apart from being a very gifted serious composer. And he’d studied with my father, funnily enough, so there was a kind of circle there. And both my father and Britten had been encouraging to me, but I think felt I needed to do a lot of work—but there was talent there if I did, so I sort of got back down to it and started really producing in my mid-twenties.

Julie Copeland : And before that had you actually written anything at all? Had you written compositions before you went back to it?

Michael Berkeley: Yes. Even at school I wrote a little choral piece which won a competition and then in my teens I was writing motets for church choirs in which I was singing and sort of making a living or conducting. So I had written a certain amount. But I hadn’t really got a very good technique. I felt I needed to go back to basics. It was at a time when people were encouraging one at the Academy to do anything and to use electronic tapes. And actually I’ve always felt that it’s fine to break the rules once you know them. And it disturbs me that the composers for a while were taught that almost anything goes—before they’d mastered writing counterpoint or straight Bach-ian harmony. It’s very important to have those ground rules I think, because it gives you a technique which stands you in good stead in the future.

Julie Copeland : Now it seems that the major influences on your own creative work, your own compositions, were the English composers—obviously if you’d worked with [Richard] Rodney Bennett and of course your father—and Benjamin Britten. Was it English music particularly that inspired you? Were there particular compositions that changed your life or that changed the direction of you as a composer?

Michael Berkeley: Well obviously Benjamin Britten was important, because he was my godfather. And he was the pre-eminent composer in England. And I think probably has emerged as the most important composer of the century in England, and indeed a world figure. And I sang on records with him as a boy treble. And his absolutely innate musicianship—I mean it was sort of Mozart-ian—he could play, conduct—and he breathed music. He took it very, very seriously. He was quite frightening to work with sometimes because he was a perfectionist. But there was another strand to my influences,. My father had a very French side to him. When he was at Oxford he was deputed to show Ravel around when Ravel came to get his honorary doctorate, because everybody knew my father composed and was interested in French music and French things in general. And Ravel looked at some of his music and said, ‘You should go to Paris and study with Nadia Boulanger.’ Which indeed he did, and he became very close friends with Poulenc and the Stravinsky family. So there was a very strong French influence in my childhood and I love Poulenc and Debussy and Ravel. And I guess The Rite of Spring, you know, to a young man, you’re so kind of testosterone driven, that piece really changed my life. I thought, ‘My God, this is it.’ You know, the most exciting, riveting, raunchy kind of score.

Julie Copeland : Rhythm’s very important to you in your compositions, too. You’ve written music that is very rhythmic—and when you mention Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, and Bartok, too, rhythm is a major factor in what distinguishes their music. Particularly The Rite of Spring. That’s what it’s really all about, those exciting, erotic rhythms.

Michael Berkeley: Exactly. I think, funnily enough, that I perhaps am almost over-rhythmic at times, because I had a very natural sense of harmony and melody. I could do that very easily. I felt less confident and rather rhythmically unco-ordinated. And as a result, you know, one often actually over-concentrated on rhythm, really, to try and compensate for what I felt was something that I was less at home with. And as a result, I found that a lot of my pieces are very rhythmically driven. Yes. Sometimes almost obsessively rhythmically driven.

Julie Copeland : Well that leads me then to the operas. You’ve written vocal music, starting with—an oratorio, perhaps, before the operas—called Or Shall We Die? and that text was written by Ian McEwan, who’s of course now a very famous novelist. And it was made into a film. Tell us about that. How did that come about and what’s it like?

Michael Berkeley: Well that was at a time when the nuclear proliferation was at its height and I was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus to write a piece for them. And I’ve always been, you know, as a broadcaster and a composer rather sort of messianic on behalf of contemporary music, and it seemed to me rather hypocritical to then go back to an old text. So if one’s being messianic about contemporary music, why not contemporary writing? And I asked Ian, and he was very keen to do this. And he said, well there was one subject that was preoccupying everyone and I don’t think one can ignore it. And he wrote this piece and he took as a central section the story of a mother at Hiroshima finding her burnt child, which was very devastating, and the words of that are almost verbatim. And we had Heather Harper singing and Richard Ayre ??? as you say made a film of it. And it was very much the work of a young person, I think. I don’t think I’d do it now. I’m slightly more nervous of polemical writing. But it has the honesty of somebody young. There are aspects of it I still like. Particularly that central section. And so that certainly in a way put one’s name on the map. It was done amidst an awful lot of publicity at the time.

Julie Copeland : And yet it’s disappeared. What happened to it? Is it because it was such a grim subject and such a didactic work? Do you feel it’s dated? I mean this was during the early eighties we should say. Did it just disappear after that?

Michael Berkeley: It had quite a few performances, actually, and it’s available on a CD. Or at least it was, it was an EMI CD. And I think it will come back into its own. And funnily enough there are people talking of doing it. Because the choral writing is quite grateful to sing, and it is quite a tonal, melodic work and quite accessible. But I suppose it was slightly going against the musical fashion of the time. In a way I’ve always done that. The funny thing is that I then moved on to rather more contemporary ways of writing, as a lot of my colleagues were moving back towards minimalism. I often feel I was going one way along the road waving to them as they went back down the other side. That’s all to do with what we were talking earlier, about being a late developer, I think. But you have to evaluate all these pieces with the passage of time, I think.

Julie Copeland : Of the two works that David Malouf has written the libretto for—one, Jane Eyre—I’m trying to imagine how this raw, rhythmic intensity of some of your music would fit with the subject of a Victorian novel, Jane Eyre. And Ba Ba Black Sheep. Why haven’t we seen those works here in Australia, for example. I mean David Malouf’s a very well-known Australian writer. Is there any chance that they will be performed here?

Michael Berkeley: Well I hope so. I mean we have been a bit frustrated by it. Especially with Jane Eyre, since it’s a chamber piece—and you know, five singers and thirteen players like the Britten chamber operas. So it could be—

Julie Copeland : It would be easy enough and commercially viable to put on a work like that. It wouldn’t be expensive.

Michael Berkeley: No, it wouldn’t. And there has been talk about it. But you know, and I think—and it’s difficult for me to say this, but it was successful and Ba Ba Black Sheep actually had a very good review here. So I don’t think that’s the problem. I tell you what I think is the problem. If anybody’s going to manage to put on a new opera, then they want to do an Australian piece. And in England we tend to want to do an English piece. And I think it’s very difficult to make these pieces ‘cross over’ because there’s a kind of feeling that we ought to honour the people we’ve got here—or there, as the case may be. And so that’s the first barrier.

Julie Copeland : And that’s specific to new opera, isn’t it? Because of course we have no compunction about doing the works of dead foreign composers—Verdi or Wagner—so it’s new works you think that people are more inclined to support their local composers.

Michael Berkeley: Well what you’ve got to remember is that any kind of operatic endeavour does require quite an input of funding. Even a small-scale one. So there is that barrier. Now I just think one has to break through it. I’m quite convinced—David [Malouf] did a wonderful libretto for both pieces. And I’m quite convinced that they would work wonderfully here and be very popular. But we just have to make that leap of faith. Or somebody does. David is a wonderfully modest man in some ways and he’s not going to go out and say, ‘You should be doing this.’ And I really can’t do that. What one has to hope is that the music travels, somebody hears it and says, ‘Actually I really love it and I believe in it.’ Jane Eyre’s coming out on a CD later this year. People will be able to listen to it and make up their own minds. I can only agree with you, really, but there’s not much I can do about it.

Julie Copeland : No. And I’m very frustrated. I’d like to see and hear both of them. I think most of our listeners would be familiar with what Jane Eyre’s about, but just tell me a little more about Ba Ba Black Sheep. What’s it about?

Michael Berkeley: Well with both operas—David [Malouf], of course, is somebody who really understands the nature of opera—and he understands that a libretto has to be something which leaves the composer something to do. And so in Ba Ba Black Sheep we took the childhood of Rudyard Kipling, who as many of your listeners will know, was brought up in India by his parents, and when he was still very young—five or six—they sent him back to England to learn to be a little English boy—in quotes, you know—and of course he’d been pampered by eyas and things up until then. And he was put in the hands—they didn’t realise this was going to happen—of a rather kind of savage woman, called Aunty Rosa, who had a bully-boy of a son called Harry. And he had a ghastly time there. And so what the opera does, really, is relate these ideas. And then it moves into an imaginary world. And in fact the imaginary world of the Jungle Book. And we know that Kipling first encountered this idea at that point. And he manages to get his revenge on these characters by entering into a fantasy world and so Harry suddenly becomes Shir Kahn the tiger. And everybody has their alter ego.. And he becomes Mowgli. And his sister becomes Grey Wolf, because she was there with him. Of course that’s something that opera can do wonderfully. Move from the world of reality into the world of fantasy. And in the twinkling of an eye. And that’s really what the opera did. It married these two worlds. And I think it also showed the damage that that experience did to Kipling. Because there is a lot of revenge in his writing. Quite savage, cruel revenge. And this sort of explains where it came from.

Julie Copeland : How did you express that in the performance? What does it look like?

Michael Berkeley: Yes, that’s got about eight or nine principals and a small chorus and about thirty players. It went from a quite austere boarding-house kind of room into a magical world where suddenly palm leaves and very exotic jungle fell down into the room and sort of pulled it apart. And then all these characters were dressed in Indian garb—so it was very colourful. And actually kids loved it—children adored it.

Julie Copeland : And what attracted both you and David Malouf to Kipling and this particular aspect of his early life?

Michael Berkeley: Well I had been interested in the idea of the strange world of Kipling. And when I mentioned it to David, he said, ‘But you know Ba Ba Black Sheep the short story,’ which I didn’t. I think I may have known the story, but he was the one who could see how to make it work. And you see the thing is, both in Ba Ba Black Sheep and in Jane Eyre, what David and I have done—I mean you can’t compete with a great story, if you just do it straight, there’s no point in doing that—what you’ve got to do is to look at it from some fresh angle. So both with Ba Ba Black Sheep and with Jane [Austen], we looked at one aspect of it. The revenge side, if you like—of Kipling—and in Jane Eyre, we looked at it very much from the position of the mad Mrs Rochester and the tragedy of her position.

Julie Copeland : Yes, because Jane Eyre, as opposed to the Kipling story, is so well known, isn’t it, and has been done in many forms. Many versions. So you have to come up with some different interpretation or different aspect of the story.

Michael Berkeley: What we did there was to concentrate it right down just to the Thornfield experience. That passage at Thornfield. So there’s just the five central characters. It starts with Jane arriving at Thornfield. Rochester falling off his horse and his first meeting with her, which is very pregnant with sexuality, and her mastering him, if you like. But all the time there is this wailing of this mad-woman upstairs. And we begin to see her position from a slightly different angle, I think. And that was done, unlike Ba Ba Black Sheep,, on a very concentrated set, done by Music Theatre Wales. And it only lasts 110 minutes, or something, so it’s quite a short opera in two acts.

Julie Copeland : Well mad women in opera—the mad woman in the attic—is a particularly apt subject, isn’t it, for opera? If you think of—well, all the feminist work—feminist studies and analysis of the mad woman in the attic—that’s quite a dramatic aspect of the story to concentrate on, for an opera.

Michael Berkeley: Yes, and of course we did it with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea firmly having been read by both of us. And it uses music from the mad scene from Donizetti, too, from Lucia di Lammermoor, because I wanted to bring in these references. But this is a very lyrical work. You asked about the rhythm, which is interesting and in a way—some people may think it didn’t work so well as a result but others think it worked better—I suppressed some of that and it’s a much more lyrical piece. I think that opera is not necessarily the palette on which you mix your most innovative colours, because you’ve got to think of singers. You’ve got to think of theatre and drama. And I think in opera we all tend to be perhaps slightly more cautious than in orchestral music or abstract music, if you like, where one can take bigger risks and move the music forward. If one looks at quite a lot of great composers there’s even an element of that, that they’ve got to think of how the piece unfolds from a dramatic point of view. The limitations of what singers can do. The singers being heard. All of those things mean that one is perhaps a little bit more cautious about the sort of ‘hot end’ of one’s writing. It doesn’t stop great masters in their youth, like Strauss in Elektra And Bartok in Bluebeard, you know.

Julie Copeland : As Artistic Director of Britain’s Cheltenham Music Festival, Michael’s involved with the Sydney Festival Director, Brett Sheehy, in exchange programs with Cheltenham where he mixes classical favourites with the new as part of his mission to find new audiences for contemporary music.

Michael Berkeley: I think it’s an absolutely essential component, but it’s also to celebrate the great masters. And frankly, most composers that I know would rather be in a program with the kind of music that they’re going to have to live up against, rather than in a program of, say, endless contemporary music. It’s quite difficult to digest. Not that those programs aren’t important. Of course they are. There are some wonderful ones. But I think for the general audience, if you want to increase them, it’s best to say, lend me your ears for a quarter of an hour, and I’ll give you things either side of it that you really like. And what I’ve found has happened at Cheltenham is that more and more people begin to get an ear for contemporary music. Because you know, it’s the opposite of familiarity breeding contempt. If you’re curious—and curiosity is what art’s all about, really—then you’ll be rewarded. And the more you expose yourself to contemporary music, the more you get a feel for it. And people start coming up to me saying, ‘You know, I really enjoyed the Addis piece’, or ‘I wasn’t so keen on the Lutislowski piece,’ or whatever it might be, or ‘The Sculthorpe piece really was fantastic…’ And then you suddenly realise that they’re listening. They’re listening, because they’re beginning to say what they like or what they don’t like. And the audiences began to increase even for the completely contemporary concerts.

So I said to Brett, here, ‘Why don’t I commission Australian pieces to take to England, which we’ll also do at Sydney [Festival] over the next few years, and I’ll commission pieces in Europe to bring out to Sydney. Which we’ll also do at Cheltenham. So it makes the most of these pieces, because if you get the money together to make a commission and the composer works a lot, it’s awful just to do it once or twice in one country. I felt ashamed that I didn’t know more Australian music. And I’ve really been rewarded by what I have heard. Because I think it shows a very different side of culture. What I love about the Australian music—I mean this is a bit of a generalisation and it goes for the visual arts, I’m passionate about the visual arts as well—is that we are probably rather angst-driven in Europe. I think that’s a follow-on from Vienna, Freud, Expressionism—

Julie Copeland : History

Michael Berkeley: History. And there is a freshness about Australian art which I think is not so obsessed by that. It’s not to say there isn’t Australian art which is like that. Of course there is. But there is a celebration of landscape. Of open space. Of warmth. And that’s very refreshing to us in Europe. And I think bringing some of what we do out here puts your music into context—that’s what’s so important about exchanging ideas. How can you know what your music is like, or your art is like, if you don’t have some world context to put it in? And for the same reason, we need to know what you’re doing. We need to hear it and be exposed to it.

Julie Copeland : In terms of the audience, you have to be very careful about programming, don’t you? This exposure to new music; balancing it with the classical composers, or more familiar work. The Australian Chamber Orchestra, for example, is often very clever at finding contemporary work that in a way complements a classical piece. And it could be Haydn or Bach or Mozart. But they will then juxtapose that with a modern—or modernist piece, if not contemporary—and you start to hear connections for the first time. You can hear the influence of Bach on that contemporary composer, for example, because you have to assume that the audiences who are coming are probably coming for the music they’re more familiar with, but they had that curiosity about something new. But it’s very important to choose the ‘right’ bit of contemporary music that will in some way enhance or complement the mainstream repertoire.

Michael Berkeley: That’s absolutely right. And I think the ACO [Australian Chamber Orchestra] are fantastic, what they’ve done. I’ve just done a piece for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which was for shakuhachi, two kotos—or it could be flute and harp—and strings. And one or two critics wrote about it and said, ‘It’s almost like a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, a contemporary Bach Brandenburg Concerto, so it does exactly that. And I’m sure that’s right. You see, every successful arts organisation—and this is something that you really always have to remind yourself—has to be innovative. If you just rely on the music of the past, you’re dead, really. I mean, yes, you can put on only Mozart festivals. And of course you’ll get wonderful audiences. But you know Mozart, Bach and Beethoven would have been the first to be saying, ‘But where’s the new music?’ They would have been saying it’s shameful not to be looking at the music of today.